God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  ‘What rest? Is not worth what? Foolish old man. Worthless!’ Alexander shook his head. ‘There’s no greatness here. A village bull might say the same.’ He looked at me, because I was sobbing with laughter. ‘What’s up with you, Ptolemy?’

  I couldn’t decide what was funnier – that Ashurbanipal had raised a statue to proclaim this message (and the rest is not worth the snap of my fingers) or that Alexander didn’t get it.

  Later, I thought that if only he’d mentioned war, the king would have found him worthy.

  There was another change. Until we marched into Cilicia, we were liberators. It was in the official letters, and in the Military Journal, too. We had come at the behest of the League of Corinth to avenge the burning of Athens and to liberate the Greeks of Ionia and Aetolia.

  That was now done. It was shown to be rather hollow by the fact that less than a month after Issus, Halicarnassus and Miletus were back in Persian hands and their fleet continued to dominate the seas.

  The truth is, all we won at Issus was time. Darius had a new army within hours, and we actually lost ground after the battle.

  And we only truly owned the ground under our feet. More and more, the king had to send detachments – like the one I had led, like Antigonus, like Seleucus – to hold key cities or to put down the endless rebellions in our rear. I use the term ‘rebellions’ advisedly – I didn’t work for the Military Journal any more, and I disdained their jargon and still do. We were the foreign usurpers. Why should we have expected loyalty of the satraps? They would make submission to us, but as soon as Darius showed his teeth, they all flocked to his banner. Including a great many Greeks.

  On our side of the struggle, once we marched south into Phoenicia, we were conquerors, not liberators, and that had an effect on the army that I didn’t like to see. The younger men revelled in it – especially relatively new recruits fresh from the farm. Their peasant myths of their own superiority were played out. They had licence to slaughter – aye, and rape and steal – because we were Macedonians!

  But the older men saw it differently. I never heard one put it just this way, but my feeling was that until we liberated the last Greek states in Asia, the old veterans could pretend to themselves that this was Philip’s son completing Philip’s crusade, and then we’d all go home.

  After Issus, Alexander bragged openly that he intended to make himself Master of Asia. King of Kings. And all the veterans knew what that meant.

  It meant thousands of stades of marching and a lot more fighting, that’s what it meant.

  Morale plummeted, and between atrocities committed on the civilian population and suicides among the older veterans, the signs were obvious.

  Phoenicia should have been easy. I can still grow angry just telling this part of the story.

  As we marched south, the cities surrendered one by one, and the Persian fleet lost base after base. Granted, in the north, they had retaken about a third of Ionia, and most of the islands, which, if you consider it, suggests that Alexander’s strategy was utterly hollow. The only thing that kept the Persians from counter-invading Greece and Macedon was lack of a strategos and Athens’ continued prevarication. Men like Kineas’s father did more to help Alexander than he did to help himself. That whole autumn and winter, had Athens come over to Persia, we’d have been cut off from our homes.

  Sparta did, in fact, join the Persian cause, but in their own special Spartan way, they left it too late and bungled it. That happened later, of course.

  We marched up to Sidon, the second-greatest city in Phoenicia, and they made submission gracefully enough, and Alexander was munificent in rewarding them for their choice. Then we marched down the coast to Tyre with four thousand Sidonese marines in our ranks.

  Again, it should have been easy.

  Alexander’s demands were very easy – the usual tokens of submission and a payment to the treasury to cover the cost of their submission – the costs of conquering them, so to speak. And taxes, of course. But Alexander was far too wise to impose a foreign government over them – he usually left a military governor with a few thousand troops to watch a whole region.

  With Tyre, which was a city associated with Melkart, the Syrian version of our Herakles, Alexander had an additional desire – a pothos, a heroic craving. At Tyre, Alexander wanted permission to worship and sacrifice (lavishly) in person at the Tyrian Temple of Melkart. Tyre was an island fortress, a set of rocks of two stades or more forming a promontory, and the temples were magnificent – but no man might enter without the leave of the city fathers.

  Alexander wanted to sacrifice there.

  I was present for the negotiations, and I watched the next year of my life vanish in poor judgement.

  Azemiticus was explaining that he had no interest in fighting, and Alexander was smiling away, already marching on, in his head, to our next prey, when the Tyrian shrugged.

  ‘As to making sacrifice at our temples,’ he said with that mock ruefulness you so easily detect as a falsehood that you know you are being mocked – then paused. He meant to offend. ‘That is the privilege of the Great King and no other.’

  Alexander’s head turned as rapidly as if he had been struck. ‘There is no longer a “Great King”. I am your king, and I will worship there.’ He smiled, his lips tight – those who knew him understood what this meant. ‘All the better that it is a privilege reserved for kings alone.’

  Azemiticus spread his hands wide, to indicate that it was beyond his control. ‘The ancient temple is in the ancient city, here on the mainland,’ he said. ‘Really, you should content yourself with that.’

  How did this man get to be the leader of one of the most powerful cities on earth? No wonder translators so often lie about what their principals have said. Had the fool Syrian merely suggested that the land temple was older and more sacred than the island temple, we would have been done. Consensus might have been reached. Alexander might easily have been convinced that the older temple was the more important.

  But the word ‘content’ and the contempt with which it was uttered settled the matter.

  Alexander’s smile didn’t waver. ‘Your temple in the city, or I storm it,’ he said.

  Azemiticus stood. ‘Try, barbarian.’ He grinned. Then he turned and left. I think he always meant to – I think he wanted, like so many other men, to be the man who stopped Alexander.

  To be fair, Tyre was a hideously hard nut to crack and Alexander didn’t want to do it, so after a stormy council meeting with Hephaestion and Craterus and all of us, we sent three officers to the city with new terms. The king was to be allowed to sacrifice at the altars of Melkart, but in every other way, Tyre paid less gold and got less interference.

  Azemiticus had all three young men executed. He stripped them naked on the walls where we could see, had spears rammed into their anuses until the spearheads came out through their mouths, and then threw them into the sea.

  What a fool. In so doing, he condemned his city to death. With whom did he think he was dealing?

  Diades was Alexander’s foremost engineer, after Halicarnassus. He was a pupil of Aristotle’s, not brilliant but careful and conscientious, and best of all, he was very good at making Alexander understand him. Alexander was too impatient for a siege, and it didn’t suit his temperament. Diades was a patient man.

  He got a small boat and had himself rowed all around the walls. Tyre was on a large island – in fact, I’ve been told it had once been four small islands, now linked together by generations of mortar and stone. The walls facing the mainland were quite high, but some of the walls were not.

  Tyre had its own fleet, and recalled a large portion of it from Persian service to face us – almost a hundred triremes, and a dozen larger ships. We had no fleet to speak of, so their sea power not only eliminated any chance that we might land troops on the lower parts of the walls, but guaranteed that they would be supplied whenever they wanted them. In fact, quite early in the siege, before we’d even begun our engineeri
ng efforts, a Carthaginian fleet arrived with food and left carrying all of the city’s women and children to safety. Carthage had the largest maritime empire in the Inner Sea, and the knowledge that they would come to the rescue of their mother city was a blow to us. Watching the ease with which their thirty-ship squadrons sailed in and out enraged Alexander, who responded with a declaration of war against Carthage. Against Carthage! Because we didn’t have enough enemies!

  The third night after the assassination of our envoys, Diades called the military council together to make his report.

  He was a short, thick man with arms like old cables, and men called him ‘The Smith’. Other men called him Hephaestus. He was not old, but he was so careful in his speech that he sometimes sounded like a man of Parmenio’s generation. He had my Helios as an assistant, and Helios grinned at me when he set up the easel on which Diades arranged his drawings.

  Diades rubbed his beard and waited for silence.

  Philotas threw a bread pill at his brother, who responded by throwing a grape at Philotas. It missed and hit his father, splashing purple-red on Parmenio’s spotless uniform chiton. Nicanor paled.

  Parmenio walked over with the grape and slapped it into his son’s hair. Then he rubbed it in.

  Nicanor just allowed it to happen.

  Alexander wasn’t the only man with a bad temper, let me tell you. At any rate, after a great deal of throat-clearing, Diades held out his hands.

  ‘Tyre,’ he said. His voice came out in an odd, loud, strangled way, and in the old temple – which we were using as both a temple and a meeting room – it was so loud that he frightened himself. He went on in a voice so soft that men behind the first row could not hear him.

  ‘Speak up!’ Alexander said.

  Diades glared at him.

  We all laughed. That seemed to help him. He steadied, looked around and rubbed his beard with his left hand.

  ‘You know how it is,’ he asked, ‘when you start a project and you don’t know if you can finish it? Those are always the hardest projects. Because you fear that all your work may be in vain. Whether that project is the pursuit of a woman, or the conquest of Asia, or the making of a fine gold seal – in every case, the uncertainty of completion is more of a limit to success than any limits to our skills – whether seduction, conquest or craftsmanship.’

  I told you – Aristotle trained him. He was a brilliant thinker, when he put himself to it.

  ‘The siege of Tyre will be an extreme example of such a project. There is only one practical way of approaching the city, and that way will bring us into contact with the highest and stoutest portion of the wall. By my estimation, it will take us seven months merely to reach a point where we might say that the city is under siege. Until then, we will merely be building – building a causeway. And the citizens of Tyre will laugh at us. We won’t interrupt their food supply. We cannot even slow their trade! We cannot build engines whose stones will hit their walls, we cannot throw fire into the city itself, we cannot open trenches, we cannot undermine. We cannot storm the city, because we would have to walk across the ocean bottom to reach it.’

  Alexander made to interrupt, but Diades, who knew his man, drove on.

  ‘But we can take the city. We will need to build a mole – a causeway – three stades long and half a stade wide. The amount of earth and stone required will make the building of this mole a greater labour than any performed by Herakles, and the gods may be jealous, because if we succeed, that mole will endure for ever. But my lord king, and all of you – if we persevere, we will succeed. Engineering is a science, not an art. If we work hard and move earth, the mole will grow a little each day, and eventually, we will have them. And if you choose not to build the mole . . .’ He shrugged. ‘We will never have them.’

  He went and sat.

  Alexander rose. ‘You are talking a siege of a year.’

  Diades nodded. ‘At least a year, unless a fortuitous event happens, or the gods take a hand.’

  Alexander shook his head. ‘We have triumphed thus far by the speed of our advance and our reputation as invincible. How will that look if we take a year to storm one city?’

  Parmenio sneered, ‘We have bypassed cities before.’

  Callisthenes shook his head. ‘Not cities that have defied us. Not cities that have murdered our ambassadors.’

  He directed the Military Journal, and he decided what the Greeks should be allowed to know – and he wrote the florid reports of our victories. His carefully doctored lies were essential to the way the Macedonian army was perceived. More and more, he worked directly with Thaïs, whom he affected to despise, and her information and his often worked together.

  I disliked him. But in this case, I agreed with him.

  ‘I took the Halicarnassus island forts,’ I said. ‘Or rather, Helios there, by the easel, took them. It took us seven months. Until the last three weeks, none of the garrison even thought that they were in danger.’

  Diades nodded his thanks to me.

  Cleitus fingered his beard. ‘If we fail here . . .’ he ventured.

  Diades slammed his fist on the table. ‘We do not need to fail!’ he roared, no longer timid.

  Alexander looked around. It was not like him to be so cautious, but he had been shaken by the killing of the ambassadors. The very impiety of it stung him.

  ‘Parmenio?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, you want my opinion?’ Parmenio asked. ‘Delighted to give it. March away. Always bypass strength. Except that in this case, your whole strategy is that we can take any city along the coast that can offer a harbour to the Persian fleet – isn’t it? So your strategy requires that we take this city – and every other city from Ionia to Aegypt.’ He sighed theatrically. ‘Of course, we could just march home. We’re richer than Croesus. We hold the best part of the empire. And my soldiers are tired, Alexander.’

  Alexander nodded. ‘My soldiers, Parmenio.’ He looked past the old general to me. ‘Ptolemy?’

  ‘I lost half of my new levies at Issus,’ I said. ‘I’ve had eleven suicides and four murders in the last month.’ I looked around and saw a great many heads nodding. ‘I’m concerned that while we sit here, Pharnabazus is retaking Ionia behind us, rendering our efforts meaningless. But . . . I agree with Diades – if we put our minds to it, I’m sure we can do it. I would only hope that once we decide on a course, we set that course in stone.’ I stood up. ‘Again, let me mention the Halicarnassus forts. It will take a long time. But like many tasks, it is the task never begun that is impossible.’

  Alexander frowned. ‘Do I ever change my mind, once I am set on a thing?’ he asked.

  Like many men, Alexander had a vision of himself that was at odds with the reality. Some men see themselves as timely, but are forever late. Other men see themselves as great lovers, and women tell a different story. So with Alexander, who thought that he possessed a will of iron.

  Parmenio guffawed. ‘You change your mind like a woman,’ he said.

  Very helpful.

  Diades alone stuck to his message. ‘We can build something worthy of a descendant of Herakles,’ he said. ‘Perhaps greater than any labour of Herakles.’

  Alexander looked at him. Looked at Parmenio.

  He was silent for a long time. And then he stood straight like a sword blade, and spoke like an orator.

  ‘Friends and allies,’ he began, and his full charm was on. ‘I see that an expedition to Aegypt will not be safe for as long as the Persians retain the sovereignty of the sea, nor is it a safe course for other reasons – and especially looking at the state of matters in Greece – for us to pursue Darius, leaving in our rear the city of Tyre itself. I would be precipitous if I were to advance with our forces towards Babylon and in pursuit of Darius and allow the Persians to reconquer the maritime districts – and with them in hand, to transfer the war into Greece with a larger army, considering that the Lacedaemonians are now waging war against us without disguise, and the city of Athens is restrained for t
he present rather by fear than by any goodwill towards us! But if Tyre were captured, the whole of Phoenicia would be in our possession and the fleet of the Phoenicians, which is the most numerous and the best in the Persian navy, would in all probability come over to us. For the Phoenician sailors and marines will not put to sea in order to incur danger on behalf of others when their own cities are occupied by us. After that – well, Cyprus will either yield to us without delay or it will be captured with ease at the mere arrival of a naval force – which then prosecutes the war with the ships from Macedonia in conjunction with those of the Phoenicians.’ He looked around.

  Alexander seldom made long speeches, and when he did, with his face shining, his whole attention on his audience, he was virtually impossible to resist. Even Parmenio was nodding along.

  ‘Once Cyprus is in our hands, we shall have the absolute sovereignty of the sea, and at the same time an expedition into Egypt will become easier for us. After we have brought Aegypt into subjection, no anxiety about Greece and our own land will any longer remain, and we shall be able to undertake the expedition to Babylon in safety with regard to affairs at home and at the same time with greater reputation in consequence of having cut off from the Persian empire all the maritime provinces and all the land this side of the Euphrates. And at Tyre, we shall have shown the world that we are worthy sons of Herakles!’

  Sons of Herakles. As Diades intended, the very challenge fired him, and he, in turn, shot it at us. Because the men of Macedon see themselves as the heirs of Herakles.

  The siege was on.

  Diades rode around the countryside for ten days while the Tyrians jeered at our lack of effort. When he returned, he sat with Alexander for most of a day.

  I sat with Thaïs, who was deeply depressed because she was pregnant, and because the Tyrians had executed one of her agents in their horrible way and dumped his body in the sea. I tried to console her that they’d executed three other men who were not her agents. ‘If they kill three of theirs for every one of ours, we will win the siege in a month,’ I joked.